CORE ORGANIC: Quality analysis of critical control points within the whole food chain and their impact on food quality, safety and health

Project summay 'quality definition' in the project 'Quality analysis of critical control points within the whole food chain and their impact on food quality, safety and health (QACCP)': Consumer demand for healthy, safe and high quality food is increasin g. Against this background, the demand for organically grown food has been growing rapidly. Organic farming contains the whole food chain from field to fork. Focusing on processing, techniques have to be optimized to assure food safety and to optimize the food quality regarding the health and sensory quality. An analyse system to optimise the process needs to be established (QACCP). The proposal will put these different aspects together following one selected product from field to fork. Therefore a transn ational expert consortium will investigate the optimization of organic production and processing in order to improve food safety as well as nutritional quality and increase health promoting aspects in consumer products. The approach will be a chain analys is approach which addresses the link between farm and fork and backwards from fork to farm. The objective is to improve product related quality management in farming and processing. A multi method approach is applied for the product quality tests. Carrot is chosen as the model vegetable since it is common for the involved SMEs and is processed for baby food; hence the results will be relevant for organic food in general as well. The analysis of the whole food chain regarding the aspects food safety, senso ry quality and health gives important information for the product development to reach more the consumers expectations on organic food. Norway contribute with the WP 8 in the project: The work of WP 8 will concentrate on quality definition from the pla nning period to interpretation of the results to WP 9. The quality preferences from consumers and processing SME?s (WP2) as well as the QACCP studies (WP3) will be used as starting point to define